


Of Brothers and Bonds

by Wreybies



Category: Dune - All Media Types, Dune Series - Frank Herbert
Genre: Elsewhere Fic, Fremen, M/M, Shai-Hulud, Sietch Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-27
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-07-03 08:23:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15815121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wreybies/pseuds/Wreybies
Summary: Life in a sietch makes room for new love.It's an Elsewhere Fic, populated only by OC's, just a snapshot of someone's life, likely never to be read, but offered up to those of my generation (and inclination) who dreamed of staking a thumper in the sand and calling to Shai Hulud, that he might grace us with his presence.Be fierce, you fremen. Be wild. Be the wind.-----------------------------------------ETA: This may turn into a series of short, loosely interconnected stories concerning the denizens of this sietch. If you'd be interested in contributing, just let me know. :)





	1. Zayd

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ElegantButler](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElegantButler/gifts).



> Youthful woolgatherings and fantasies given something akin to a shape after a conversation in other climes with ElegantButler; thus, my gift to her.

Seven stillsuits remained for repair. Five of them were simple tears or worn spots, the other two had to be diagnosed. Twelve were finished and ready to be put back into service. Twice again what old Demas could have done by himself. Repairing stillsuits was needful work. There would be many more than seven waiting for Zayd come tomorrow.

But for today, it was enough. He’d earned his water.

Zayd gave the last of the suits he’d patched to Demas to inspect, but it was only symbolic. The old man’s eyes were going cloudy behind their blue luster. That’s why Zayd was here, with his nimble hands, to ease the burden on Demas and let him keep his dignity as Zayd was trained to take over for him in the fullness of time. His eyes were cloudy, but his mind was sharp. Zayd was respectful. Demas was kind in return.

“This is fine work,” said Demas. “The Maker keep you, boy.”

“And you, Demas.” He stood and waited for a moment.

“You have things to do, I know, I know.” The old man smiled a gap toothed smile and shooed him out and on his way.

Two days ago Zayd had come out of his tiny room to find his mother Mahassa passing three water rings to Nadim, her eyes hollow, dark, and haunted, Nadim looking stunned.

Beautiful Nadim with his elegant eyebrows and sharp nose, his smooth hair so black it was almost blue.

His mother had swept past them, her eyes bright with tears. Tears!

They had walked in solemn silence through the sietch. Nadim’s stiff manner and brisk pace had brooked no words.Out the tall exit, through the chasm.

It was a long walk.

They climbed the deep crack in the right wall, the hidden steps. They came out at the top of the cliff, the sea of sand before them, rippling dunes, dust devils, the horizon a bewitching dance, a mirage. The realm of Shai-Hulud. They stood alone on the cliff, here in His presence.

“Do you love me?” Nadim had asked.

Zayd, winded from the climb, looked at Nadim, but his lover’s eyes remained fixed on the horizon.

“You know I do,” Zayd had answered.

“I am old…”

Zayd stopped him. “You are four years older than me, Nadim, and I have ridden the Maker. I am not a boy,” he said. _I have slept in your arms, taken your kisses, and so much more_ , Zayd left unsaid.

Nadim took his hand and passed him the water rings.

“But she gave them to you, Nadim.”

“To give to _you_ , Zayd. This is the water of your father.”

Just three rings. So little. Zayd had no memory of his father, gone when he was just learning to walk. Harkonnen bastards, fat with water, had killed him. That was all he knew. The rest was unaskable. His mother’s eyes forbade.

Three rings. The water of one man’s life reduced to almost nothing.

“What does this mean?” The question was meant for the wind, for the sand, for God.

“It means we will care for Mahassa. She will not want.”

“You have your own mother to care for.”

“I have three brothers, and my father is strong.” Nadim had squeezed Zayd’s hands hard, the rings deep within their combined grip. “They are not fools, Zayd. Nor is Mahassa. She gives you your father. It is her blessing, and for that, you and I will watch over her to the end of her days. Together.”

A scorching wind had come up the cliff face just then. Zayd had winced away from the blistering heat, the sharp, acrid smell of the Maker.

 _May his passage cleanse the way_.

“Where will we live?” Zayd had asked.

Nadim’s chest had filled at Zayd’s words. Acceptance. A choice made. “My brother has made a place for us. His family grows, and has been given a larger space. We will take the old one.”

There were deeper implications there. Zayd wasn’t losing a mother, he was gaining another, larger family, with all that it entailed. That would be new.

He had nodded. It was a good arrangement. Nadim’s brothers were respected. They would be his own brothers now. They would stand with him, and he with them.

Had Mahassa come to these conclusions too?

That was two days ago.

The next day, yesterday, when he returned home, his things were all neatly bundled together within a piece of rough spun cloth. It was almost nothing.

“My cousin Anisa will come to stay with me,” his mother had said, as her goodbye. It was all she could muster, though she was always a woman of few words. 

Anisa was ill. The sietch had shifted and found a new point of stability. Mahassa had given her blessing, and so too had the sietch. Nadim and Zayd would be allowed their lives together, protected, but nothing ever came without a cost of responsibility.

And that had been fine too. There was respect to be had there. It was an opportunity, not a burden. It was a chance to be a man and stand heel to heel with Nadim when the Maker’s stunning countenance passed them on the sand, when they climbed with their maker hooks.A chance to be worthy of someone who took Zayd’s breath away every time he saw him, to ride with him into the deep desert, to share a life. 

That was yesterday, the last day he would sleep to the sound of his mother’s light snoring.

   Today he'd taken his bundle and kissed her on the cheek. Words would come later, when they could.

Zayd made his way through the sietch, past women and men at their work, past children laughing in simple games, past the break to the left that would take him to where he had lived an entire life until now. He continued on, he was greeted, he greeted in return.

Soraya, old as time, and bent as a twig, stopped him with her bony hand and gave him two spice cakes and a pat on the arm. She giggled like a little girl. There was nothing Soraya did not know.

Nadim and his brothers and his father stood before the entrance to where he would live this new life.Each in turn gripped his forearm, and he theirs. It was sealed. It was sacred.

That night in Nadim’s arms, when their love was sated, Nadim had asked, “You have heard of the one they call Usul?”

It had made the hairs on Zayd’s arms stand up. “Yes,” he replied. “Muad’dib,” he whispered.

“They say he will soon call to all of us, to stand against the Harkonnen, to take back what is ours.” There was a question there Nadim left unasked.

“And we will answer,” Zayd replied, wishing his voice was as deep and grown as Nadim’s.

   Moments passed. Nadim brushed away the hair from Zayd’s face, his hand passing over his features in the candle light, memorizing them.

“Yes, we will.”


	2. Mahassa

   “Anisa, my cousin, will come to stay with me,” said Mahassa.

   He was so small, like his father Jorme. Zayd would look like a boy long into manhood and then one day the years would catch up with him overnight. That had been Mahassa’s story too.

   But he had Nadim to care for him now.

   She was grateful that Jorme had not lived to see it. He would not have understood. He was a good man, a kind man, but his imagination was small and practical and would not have made room for this.

   When she gave Nadim the water rings, she had only meant to spare herself the pain of passing them to Zayd herself. Only now did she think that perhaps she also meant to paint Zayd’s father in gentler colors for Zayd, so that he would see Nadim’s face when he thought of his father.

   “Anisa is ill,” said Zayd.

   Yes, she had been ill for a long time. A coughing sickness, and sometimes there was blood in her spittle. She was alone and shrunken away into a corner, trying to disappear, so there wasn’t exactly a line of caring souls vying to take her in.

   Her son’s eyes turned inward, absorbing the information. Small, but bright. He came to the conclusion quickly enough. A slight nod of the head confirmed it. He went to his room in silence. They rarely spoke.

   She’d bundled his things up for him in a cloth. It amounted to almost nothing. His maker hooks were leaned against the corner in his tiny room. Those were what mattered. His manhood made manifest in two lengths of curved steel.There was nothing else. He kept his stillsuit at work, in the space where Demas repaired them. Soon that space with be Zayd’s. It was a good job. A man who is small with deft hands would find respect repairing stillsuits.

   And he had Nadim.

   It was still hard for her to imagine them together. Sabella, Nadim’s mother, had been the one to tell her first, woman to woman, mother to mother. Mahassa still felt Sabella’s warm hand on her arm when she’d said, “Let it be, Mahassa.”

   Hearing it was like a spice blow in the distance, but only a fool would be blind to how Nadim had courted Zayd. He’d been as respectful and conscientious as could be asked of any young man, had Zayd been a daughter. She’d known, and he knew she knew, and quietly they’d danced until she was satisfied it was more than just youthful urges.

   He had stayed, grave and resolute. And handsome. It couldn’t be denied. More than one sietch girl would cry herself to sleep, heartbroken at the news - news that would travel faster than the Maker through the sand.

   Three rings she’d given him. A husband, a father, her own youth of kisses in dark passages and the fleeting gift of prettiness. Three rings to love her son and care for him.

   Everything she had.

   Three rings and a son.

   He’d taken the rings silently, holding her eyes piercingly, betraying neither surprise nor disappointment that it was so little, and then Zayd had come into the room and it was all too much to bear.

   She pushed down the thought that she had sold him, sold Zayd of a pittance of faded memories. It wasn’t that. Zayd wanted to go, to be with Nadim, but a mother without a sense of guilt is no mother at all, or so she told herself.

   She pulled back the curtain that closed off his room. He was curled on the palette, the candle still lit. She entered silently and blew it out.

* * *

    Zayd left early with his bundle of things hanging over his shoulder from one of his maker hooks. With assurances that he would find something to eat along the way, he kissed her and was gone before the tears welled from her eyes. He spared her that.

   Out into the sietch she sought Anisa.

   She was where she always was, curled in a corner of her brother’s space.

   “Thought you’d never come.” Cadok was a bitter, pinched man. Childish and petty. He made you take it, where his sister wanted only to be left alone.

   “Zayd took his things just now. Literally, just now. And here I am.” Mahassa loathed him. He’d been there the day Jorme was taken by the Harkonnen. Somehow only Jorme was gone.

 _Why not you instead_? she thought.

   “So, Nadim finally has his toy all to himself,” said Cadok.

   That was too close to the bone, and Mahassa snapped. In two steps her crysknife was at his throat, the flat of the blade down along her forearm. She had only to flex her arm and Cadok’s blood would spill into the sand, as wasted and useless as the man himself.

   “Finish him, cousin.” Anisa’s raspy voice came from the back of the room. “I’ll tell whatever lie you like.”

   Mahassa held Cadok’s eye, just inches from her own, then pulled the blade away from his neck. There was a faint red line where it had kissed him.

   “Bitches, the both of you.”

   “For all your charms, Cadok, you’d think some woman would have forgiven you that tiny cock of yours.” Anisa shuffled passed him and out of the rooms.

   Mahassa backed out of the room, never once taking her eye off the man. He rubbed his neck indignantly.

   “Put that thing away,” said Anisa.

   Mahassa sheathed the crysknife.

   “You can’t go pulling it on everyone who has something to say about Zayd.”

   “Watch me.”

   “No thank you. And if you care at all about that boy, you won’t. He has Nadim now.”

   “I won’t…”

   “Won’t what? Let him grow up? Let him defend himself? Let Nadim defend his honor? What won’t you do, Mahassa?” She shook her head. “People will always talk. Tadeo and Obasi will break a few noses defending their Nadim’s honor. Hagan will apologize for his brothers’ tempers, again, defending their honor. And all four of them will circle around Zayd. Let them. Men understand defending a brother. If you do it, it’s a mother defending a child.”

   “Sounds like they’re all children.”

   “Now you’re making sense.”

   They walked in silence for minutes before Mahassa noticed the grin curling the side of Anisa’ face.

   “You are a strange woman, Anisa.”

   “We’re discussing how your son finds a way to be with his man without driving you insane, but I’m the strange one. Sure.”

   Mahassa thought for a moment that Anisa was coughing, but she was laughing.

   And then Mahassa was laughing.

   Anisa’s frail arm wrapped around Mahassa’s back and the tension left her.

   They passed unseen in plain sight through the sietch. Two small women of no importance amongst hundreds.

 

 


End file.
